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INSIDE THIS REPORT

• Avi Loeb's new Medium post lays out the physics case against exotic "warp bubble" explanations for fast-moving UAP orbs.
• The council he now chairs has real government backing — but also real critics inside the scientific establishment who question its credibility.
• The core question remains unanswered: will the council get access to classified data, or is it built to analyze only what the Pentagon already chose to release?

By Samuel López | USA Herald

There is a version of this story where a Harvard astrophysicist finally forces the U.S. government to open its vault of classified UAP data, and there is a version where he becomes the public face of a well-funded science project that never quite gets past the theorizing stage. Right now, both versions are still on the table — and after digging through Avi Loeb's latest Medium post, published July 1, 2026, I don't think even Loeb knows which one he's going to end up living.

Loeb is the chair of the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, a body assembled over the past several weeks at the request of the White House, the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the broader intelligence community.

The Physics Problem With "Warp Bubbles"

Most of Loeb's post is a technical takedown of one of the internet's favorite explanations for UAP: that the orbs witnesses describe are gliding around inside some kind of exotic spacetime bubble, a real-life warp drive. Loeb walks through why that doesn't hold up. Any object moving faster than sound through Earth's atmosphere has to push air out of the way, and that collision generates heat, light, and a shockwave — a fireball and a sonic boom, essentially, whether the propulsion is a jet engine or something we've never seen before. He argues the same logic applies even to a warp-bubble scenario: if a bubble moved through air anywhere close to the speed of light, the energy released would rival a large nuclear detonation in a fraction of a second.

Then he applies that physics to a case everyone already knows. Loeb points to Navy Commander David Fravor's well-documented account of the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, where the object was reported as roughly 12 meters long and moving faster than five times the speed of sound. Run the numbers, Loeb says, and that kind of speed should have superheated the surrounding air to more than 1,600 degrees Kelvin and produced a shockwave audible for kilometers. Nobody in the strike group reported hearing one.

It's a genuinely interesting argument, and it's the strongest part of the piece. What it isn't is an explanation. Loeb is very good at telling you what the orbs probably aren't. He offers far less on what they actually are — including the reports AARO itself has already made public, like the case from October 2023 in which law enforcement described an orange "mother orb" releasing smaller red orbs, one of which reportedly hovered silently for hours. Roughly 40 percent of the phenomena in that case remain officially unexplained. That's the kind of detail that keeps this story alive, and it's also the kind of detail Loeb's post raises and then moves past without digging in further.